Photos by Lara Goetsch. Top: Donald Brearley (center) and (clockwise from top) Govind Kumar, Brad Bukauskas, Behzad Dabu, Rob Fenton, Joel Gross, Will Allan, Alex Weisman and Michael Peters. Center: Joel Gross, right, Will Allan, center and Alex Weisman. Bottom: Joel Gross and Andew Carter
By securing the Midwest premiere of The History Boys, TimeLine Theatre scored a mighty coup. One of the most lauded, and buzzed-about productions on Broadway when it debuted there, Alan Bennett’s drama threaded through with music is the sort of show you expect to go to the Goodman or the Steppenwolf once it leaves New York. Instead, it came to TimeLine, a theater tucked into the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ – a place where AA meetings are often ongoing downstairs while the show is going on upstairs.
Shaping this demanding, complex story about a teacher as heroic as he is despicably flawed? Nick Bowling, an understated powerhouse of a director who – unlike, say the Goodman’s Bob Falls or Steppenwolf’s Anna D. Shapiro – juggles his work in the theater with a full-time day job as a corporate concierge. It’s difficult to imagine the piece in better hands.
Set in the 1980s, The History Boys is provocative and gripping. The unnerving element of provocation is rooted in Hector, a general studies teacher adored by his pupils. Hector’s got a passion for literature and history that is infectious, a fathoms-deep knowledge base that spans pop culture to Medieval poetry, and a gentle, unshakable love and respect for both his students and his subjects. He is also a pedophile. Undeniably heinous as that is and try though you might, Hector is also all but impossible not to like. 
He is, Hector says, merely “warm(ing) himself with the vitality of boys” when he practices a “laying on of the hands” while giving favored senior class students a ride home on his motorcycle. The boys seem untroubled by Hector’s attentions. Is that even possible in real life? Could young men take such a shrugging attitude toward an attempted grope by a beloved teacher? Bennett makes you believe that they would. Indeed, one of the significant, disquieting strengths of The History Boys is Hector’s undeniable lovability. Just try to despise him and dismiss him as an evil, damaging pervert: You can’t. In this monumentally challenging role, Donald Brearley etches a character both deeply flawed and undeniably empathetic. It’s to Brearley and Bowling’s credit that The History Boys is apt to leave audiences so conflicted.
Yet the primary conflict of The History Boys isn’t about Hector’s sexual predilections, it’s about his teaching. In Hector’s free-wheeling class, the boys might one day practice French gerunds by act outing an elaborate improv scene set in a Parisian brothel and the next day come to blows over a discussion of “Now Voyager” or the subtext in an A.E. Houseman poem. Hector believes in learning for its own, magnificent sake. When the boys yawn and complain that that poetry is a waste of time because it’s about “stuff (that) hasn’t happened to us yet,” Hector’s reply is glorious: “But it will, it will. Grief. Happiness. Even when you’re dying. Poetry is the trailer. Forthcoming attractions.”
Hector’s antithesis (and nemesis) is Irwin, a young (“he’s five minutes older than we are” a student grouses) gun brought in by a results-oriented headmaster to prepare the boys for college entrance exams, and increase the percentage of students who get into “Oxbridge.” (A nom de clef for Oxford and Cambridge.) For Irwin, the pursuit of knowledge is useful only for whatever tangible benefits it yields. Moreover, he stresses, history isn’t about facts and truth – it’s about salesmanship. “History is not a matter of conviction. It’s performance,” Irwin asserts. On exams, he continues, the important thing isn’t to get to the truth of any given question, it’s to impress the examiners. “Flee the crowd. Be perverse,” Irwin counsels. Argue that “Stalin was a sweetie.” “Soft-peddle” the Holocaust.
Bennett’s ability to broach such issues without inspiring a mass-walkout by offended theater goers is the mark of a gifted playwright. Of course, it helps that Timeline has a seamless ensemble in place, each individual character gleaming with wrenching clarity.
You know these boys. Whether you went to high school in Shropshire or Lincolnshire, you grew up with young men like the devastatingly handsome and cocksure lothario Dakin (Joel Gross), the sensitive, cruelly overlooked Posner (Alex Weisman), the singularly focused Scripps (Will Allan) and the plodding workhorse jock Rudge (Michael Peters). Their tragedies and triumphs will be instantly, intimately familiar to anyone who has survived the byzantine caste system and emotionally overloaded years that define high school. Which is to say, all of us.Weisman is exceptional, delivering both the pathos and the gallows humor in funny/tragic lines such as “I’m a Jew. I’m small. I’m homosexual. I live in Sheffield. I’m fucked.” Only a junior at Northwestern, Weisman is an actor who could well have a blazing career in front of him.
As Irwin, Andrew Carter is razor sharp, giving a piercing portrait of a man who – rather like Hector – is torturously attracted to the senior year golden boys he must face down every day in the classroom. Equally memorable is Ann Wakefield as the sole female in this testosterone-fueled world. Her second act lament over teaching “five centuries of masculine ineptitude” is such a showstopper, it doesn’t matter that Bennett lapses briefly from the theatrical to the didactical.
In these students and their educators, Bennett captures the sweet and the bitter of adolescence in its last, pure flourish before reluctantly resigning oneself to adulthood. A key part of the picture is Brian Sidney Bembridge’s ingenious set, which transforms Timeline’s lobby into half a dozen dorm rooms (each one a perfect match with the occupant’s personality) and the stage into a class room and the headmaster’s office.
Capping off the wrenching wonders of the production is its music. From the recordings of vintage Pet Shop Boys to Posner’s melancholy show tune solos, Andrew Hansen’s soundscape is a dizzying, evocative delight. In the best way – and in the words of one of the songs Posner delights in singing – The History Boys will leave you bewitched and bothered.
The History Boys continues through Aug. 2 at TimeLine Theatre, 615 W. Wellington. Tickets are $25 - $35 and available by clicking here or calling 773/281-8463.
.jpg)
Comments